Getting it into your agent
One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.
npx agentmods add skills/rpraharaj/forward-deployed-engineer/estimationnpx skills add rpraharaj/forward-deployed-engineer --skill estimationgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/rpraharaj/forward-deployed-engineerWrote this? Show the measurements
A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/rpraharaj/forward-deployed-engineer/estimation)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/rpraharaj/forward-deployed-engineer/estimation"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/rpraharaj/forward-deployed-engineer/estimation.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>What it costs to keep this loaded
Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5 | $0.00104 | $0.02242 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00052 | $0.01121 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00021 | $0.00448 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00010 | $0.00224 |
Grade A, and why
estimation scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 4d ago.
A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.
Nothing flagged
None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 197 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Estimation
Putting a number on it without lying.
Why this exists
Estimates fail for two reasons, and only one of them is about estimating.
The first is ungrounded sizing — a number produced before anyone looked at the code. feasibility-probe exists to fix that, and this skill depends on it absolutely. Estimating without it is guessing with extra confidence.
The second is that engineers estimate the coding and are then held to the delivery. The code takes four days; the change lands three weeks later, after review latency, a schema approval, a security scan, a release window, and two rounds of UAT feedback. Nobody was wrong about the coding.
An FDE is exposed on both counts, plus a third: you don't know this organization's overhead yet, and it varies enormously. In some places a PR merges in an hour; in others it takes nine days and two sign-offs.
When this applies
- "How long will this take?"
- A date is being committed to
- Sizing a delivery plan
- Someone wants a single number
When it doesn't
- Feasibility hasn't been done — do that first, and say why
- The work is genuinely exploratory. A spike gets a timebox, not an estimate.
- Deciding whether to do something. That's
solution-design, where relative cost is enough.
Prerequisites
.fde/04-feasibility.md— required. The change shapes, sites, and deceptive costs are the input..fde/06-blast-radius-*.md— coordination cost lives here.fde/00b-access.md— blocked access is calendar time.fde/02b-ownership.md— review and approval paths
Procedure
1. Estimate from the feasibility shapes
feasibility-probe classified each requirement by shape. The shape predicts cost far better than intuition about difficulty:
| Shape | Sizing note |
|---|---|
| Configuration | Small — unless the config lives in an environment you can't reach, which makes it a queue-wait |
| Extend existing | Small to medium, and predictable |
| New component | Medium, usually the best-estimated shape |
| Modify shared | Cost is in the callers, not the change. Count them. |
| Cross-cutting | Largest and most underestimated. Looks small at every individual site. |
What this file has done since we first saw it
Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.
- 4d ago First seen · 197 lines · 104 tokens per session scan A 6a670c0c9029
estimation is a skill published in the GitHub repository rpraharaj/forward-deployed-engineer (5 stars, last pushed 17d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 104 tokens to every session and 2,242 once invoked, about $0.0005 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.
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